“The Australian people are mostly newcomers. They and their land must form a bond .... otherwise we will always remain poor, confused strangers in our own lands.” Tim Flannery 'The Future Eaters'

Concept

Land is central to Australian culture and history. For indigenous people it is the source of spiritual and material nourishment and has been for more than 40,000 years. As a predominantly urban culture, much of what Australians experience and understand about the land is conveyed and interpreted to us by a whole range of media: cinema, television, painting, photography etc. This mediation process places a frame around the subject, whereby ‘the land’ becomes landscape, an object for distant appreciation.

“Landscapes are culture before they are nature; constructs of the imagination projected onto wood and water and rock.” Simon Schama

The series of narratives, commentaries and interactions which are encountered by the user explore the transactions that occur between people and the land, the individual and the landscape, place and memory. The interactive design allows each individual’s cognitive and assimilation processes to operate in correspondence with what is experienced.

Interface: the Experience

The interface design approach is demonstrated in the prototype and based upon three principles:

• a rapid, experiential encounter with a familiar landscape, poetic to the senses, with different narratives and different voices speaking from various perspectives: it is vivid but unsettling.

• a more measured pace which, like a pause during a bushwalk or a break from a task, encourages reflective thought on conjective, even disputative, information: it is didactic but in the active sense, like absorbing a well constructed novel, or examining an archeological site.

• a text-based point of access which enables the narratives and the information and the images they contain to be explored using linkings based on sources, word associations, indexes and titles.

“I am before a moving image - it is an image of the sea, the horizon line bisecting the frame of the image, top to bottom - the surf rolls in, endlessly. ”

Interface: the Audience

The user determines the degree of their involvment in this process by being able to identify and select different ‘levels’ of immersion. The experience can be about enjoying the sound and image which construct this multimedia landscape, and it can become a resource tool for gaining knowledge and insight into the contemporary and historic environment, an interactive documentary about this time and place.

Interaction

The prototype has been developed with an interface and navigation system which enables the user to enjoy a rich visual diffusion of landscape images collected from NSW South Coast locations. The interface design provides a pleasurable experience and then as an option, provides intuitive access to knowledge and information related to that experience, via the path through the landscape or through the text-based ‘sources’ feature.

The many stories, both historical and contemporary, which lie hidden in the landscape, compel the user to piece together the real picture, often at variance with the image of landscape, a picture much richer than being simply the backdrop to events.

Prototype Created with support from the Australian Film Commission. Background and development PDF

Reference: book: chapter in Strangers on the Land.

Demo: Video link 5m